It is previously known to manufacture electrical conductors and components on flexible backings or carriers by firstly apply a thin layer (<1 mm) of conducting material on the backing, e.g. metal or metal alloy or doped resin material, and secondly remove not wanted parts of said layer from the backing by etching with chemical substances. A drawback inherent in this kind of technique is that the process has to be done in a number of separate steps and thus it is only possible to perform this technique in a continuous process if the feeding rate of the web is low. An other problem is the possibility of unsufficient etching (when the process is isotropic). Further, the employed chemical substances give risk to waste management problems and high environmental loads.
Besides, it is previously known to remove thin layers from multilayered flexible material by milling, e.g. when perforating stamps. It is also known to measure the distance between two rolls forming a nip, through which a web of high resistivity is passed, by applying a voltage over the rolls. The measured resistance is decisive of said distance.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,083,837 illustrates a method and a device for uninterrupted manufacturing of electrical components. A metal sheet is passed through a nip between an embossing roller and an anvil deforming the metal sheet into a repeated pattern consisting of thick and thin regions. Downstream said nip a dielectric base material is applied to the thus deformed metal sheet and the assembly is fed to a process station where the thin metal regions are removed by etching, sputtering or abrading. Then the produced electrical components supported by said carrier of dielectric material are supplied to further process station. This known process requires a number of process stations and deforms rather than shapes the metal layer. Thus, the distance between the roll and the anvil is not critical and there is no means provided to adjust the size of nip. Further, the carrier material has to be flowable to adapt to the embossed metal layer.